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Late Nights at the Scriptorium: Interim Results from the Interface Cell of the MONK Project Stéfan Sinclair, Andrew Macdonald, Matthew Bouchard, Mike Plouffe, Alejandro Giacometti, Amit Kumar, Milena Radzikowska, Stan Ruecker, Piotr Michura, Carlos Fiorentino, Matthew Kirschenbaum, and Catherine Plaisant The Metadata Offer New Knowledge (MONK) Project is an attempt to leverage emerging text mining, text analysis, and text visualization technologies for use by humanities scholars. Led by PIs John Unsworth and Martin Mueller, the MONK team consists of over 35 researchers at 7 universities in the United States and Canada. The project is organized around five core research areas, or cells, dedicated respectively to data, analytics, users and use cases, collaboration, andRead More →

The purpose of this session, presented at the 2007 Society for Digital Humanities Conference, was to discuss a set of research projects that deal with visualizing features of individual documents. These projects have been proceeding in association with the Metadata Opens New Knowledge (MONK) project. MONK is an attempt to build on the earlier NORA and Wordhoard projects in their efforts to make data-mining and visualization systems available in forms that are congenial to humanities scholars, and that work across a wide range of digital collections. The visualization component includes both scientific visualizations, where numeric data about the collections is presented in visual forms, andRead More →

The goal of the NORA project is to produce software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries. The Clear Browser (shown above) provides a number of blank kernels that can be configured by the user through a data mining “training” process, then be applied to the larger collection. This sketch shows a total collection of 5000 author names, with a subset selected by the kernel. Team: University of Alberta University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign University of Maryland Mount Royal University CaSTA 2006: Breadth of Text – A Joint Computer Science and Humanities Computing Conference. UniversityRead More →

The goal of this article is to identify and describe one of the primary functions of aesthetic quality in the design of computer interfaces and visualization tools. We suggest that researchers in library and information science, computing science, and humanities computing can derive advantages in visual research by acknowledging – through their efforts to advance aesthetic quality – that a significant function of aesthetics in this context is to inspire the user’s confidence. This confidence typically serves to create a sense of trust in the interface or tool, and to increase its perceived usability. In turn, this increased trust may result in an increased willingness to engage with the interface, on the basisRead More →